This invention relates to apparatus for collecting and storing glass bottle containers and, more particularly, machines for collecting, crushing, and storing crushed glass bottles in recycling, and for dispensing coins or tokens in exchange for the bottles so collected.
With increasing emphasis in recent years on energy conservation and environmental preservation, the collection and recycling of empty glass bottles has become an important factor in the conservation and preservation effort. The recycling of glass bottles has helped to reduce the presence of broken glass bottles strewn throughout the environment and lessen energy consumption by recycling empty glass bottles for future use. Numerous states and localities have adopted glass conservation programs that require the recycling of glass bottles.
Unfortunately, the lack of an efficient and economical system to recover and reuse glass bottles has largely caused a tremendous waste of recoverable bottles, since currently it is often easier and more economical, in the short term, to discard the bottles, instead of recycling them. Additionally, the recycling of bottles poses numerous problems in ascertaining whether a particular bottle is refundable; sorting refundable bottles by brand and color; and determining the value of the refund to be given by the store to the customer. Often, stores must either hire extra employees for these particular time consuming tasks or allow customers to return the bottles on an honor system, in which the customer is trusted to report the correct amount of the bottles he has returned.
Some machines have been developed for encouraging the recovery and recycling of glass bottle containers. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,248,389 to Thompson et al discloses an apparatus for sorting and handling diverse types of containers by using an optical scanner to read a code on the container. However, this machine does not preselect the containers prior to acceptance by the machine to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable containers. Similarly, it does not sort the bottles by the color of the glass. Consequently, a customer who inserts a non-refundable bottle into the apparatus must wait while the machine conveys the bottle to the optical reader, which determines the identity of the bottle. The resulting crushed glass from the break up of the accepted bottles is a mixture of colors due to the lack of color separation by the machine of the diverse bottle colors. Accordingly, the crushed glass must either be painstakingly separated by color prior to use, or melted down as a color mixture, which mixture may have less economic value per unit weight than color separated glass.
Likewise, the apparatus shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,253,573 and 4,276,467 to Dubberly et al. receives and handles empty beverage containers for refund purposes, but the apparatus does not either sort the bottles by color or break up the bottles to save storage space. Finally, U.S. Pat. No. 3,955,179 to Planke shows an apparatus for the automatic pattern recognition and registration of empty bottles; however, the apparatus neither sorts the bottles by color nor crushes the bottles.